For many years now KHS, a leading manufacturer of filling and packaging systems for the beverage, food and non-food industries, has offered its customers can seamers from Ferrum Packaging AG, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of seaming machines. On Wednesday, the German engineering company announced to acquire a stake in the Swiss company. The acquisition is still pending approval from antitrust authorities.
“Ferrum AG is the worldwide well-known manufacturer of can seamers. Combined with our future-oriented solutions in the field of filling and packaging technology, we form an effective union that is valued highly in the market," emphasizes Martin Resch, CFO in charge of purchasing at KHS.
Ferrum Packaging AG was founded as a subsidiary of Ferrum AG and incorporates Ferrum's entire worldwide can seaming business. KHS will be acquiring minority ownership in Ferrum. At the same time, Ferrum Packaging Inc., the US subsidiary of Ferrum Packaging AG, will be taking over KHS’ can seaming business together with its employees and will be integrating it into the joint offer.
The aim of the merger is to develop and globally market joint solutions. To date, the KHS Group has offered tried and tested Ferrum can seamers only as accessory components for its canning lines. Effective immediately, work in close cooperation will begin on developing even more efficient systems including a filler-seamer block. "Based on skilled future planning of technical components, block solutions are to be designed to be as integrative as possible and do away with redundant functions," says Dr. Siegmar Stang, Executive Vice President Wet Area at KHS.
Combined filler-seamers designed for the maximum capacity class are planned with clear benefits for the overall process, as Oliver Bühler, CTO of Ferrum Packaging AG, explains. "We don't want to merely present one solution; we want to develop a comprehensive system portfolio that meets the needs of every customer while offering clear customer benefits." Among other things, the two partners have set themselves as targets for their new developments a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) through shorter changeover times and more rapid sanitizing phases. In addition, the hygienic environment of the systems is to be further optimized.
The intensified cooperation will also bring about extensive customer benefits in the area of customer service. In the future, all services for combined systems from KHS and Ferrum will be offered from a single source. "This will not only reduce the effort for our customers, they will also benefit from shorter machine wait and downtimes," explains Dr. Beat Bühlmann, President of the Board of Directors at Ferrum.
The planned services include joint overhauls of the systems and integration of the KHS remote maintenance system Remote Diagnostic Service (ReDiS). Coordinating the supply of spare parts will also result in improvements in discontinuation management to ensure continued operation of the machines and thus the availability of systems.
